


the other side of blue

by ninemoons42



Category: The Gentleman Bastard Sequence, The Hour, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - Book/Movie Fusion, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Post-War, Alternate Universe - Thieves, Bondage, Dom/sub Play, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Flogging, Genderplay, Genderswap, Interrogation, Mercenaries, Psychological Torture, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Spies & Secret Agents, Woman on Top, dark!Charlotte, non-powered
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 04:27:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In another version of post-war Europe, Erik Lehnsherr is part of a group of mercenaries who sort of work for a man named Jean. Erik sometimes works with a woman named Alix, and when he and she are sent after an actor who's been up to no good, they run into a woman named Charlotte - and trouble ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the other side of blue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afrocurl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrocurl/gifts), [error_era](https://archiveofourown.org/users/error_era/gifts), [firstlightofeos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstlightofeos/gifts), [Pangea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pangea/gifts).



title: the other side of blue  
author: [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)**ninemoons42**  
word count: approx. 17,600  
fandoms: primary - X-Men: First Class. secondary - The Hour, The Gentleman Bastard Sequence  
characters: Charlotte Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr. Edie Lehnsherr appears briefly. OCs are based on characters from the secondary fandoms previously mentioned.  
rating: NC-17 for violence and for sexual content  
warnings: The idea for this came to me from out of a clear blue sky, and began life as a dark!Charles Xavier prompt that eventually got turned into a dark!Charlotte one, hence the original title in gDocs, "Charlotte 'round the twist". Relevant Tumblr tag [here](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/tagged/beautiful-girl-bless-your-heart). This is a story of killers and freak shows and madwomen, with bonus D/s themes thrown in. Caveat lector.

  
**_the other side of blue_ **

_He remembers the exasperated affection in his mother’s eyes whenever she called him_ mazik _, which she had done on a near-daily basis. Always the ringleader, always the daredevil. Stealing apples to give them away to the younger children; picking fights with bullies and blowhards and finding a way to win every time - the first to lead the other children into innocent trouble and the first to own up to any serious wrongdoing._

_He remembers coming home to his mother, limping after he’d fallen out of a tree in a mostly successful attempt to save their next-door neighbors’ cat. Her voice, warm and worried and soothing as she wrapped his sprained ankle: “You have no sense of self-preservation, Erik my beloved, and it’s time you acquired one. It’s a world out there that admires heroes, then turns around and grinds them into stuffing. I would not want to wake up one day to find out that my good and proud and reckless boy had been ground into the dust.”_

_She had been a wise woman, full of truths both large and small. She would have left behind a small body when she died for her truths, a small impression on the hard-packed ground that filled up quickly with dirty fast-falling snow._

_He likes to imagine that she’d had a strong death, a good one, with the Shema on her lips; perhaps she helped the others face the end with dignity. He’ll never really know, because the last time he’d seen her was when she’d sent him out into the night, into dubious life, into the only kind of safety that they could find - escape into the world, away from the guns and the dogs and the train tracks that could only have led to death by terrible fire._

**One: A Man Named Erik**

Erik doesn’t look up from his whetstone even as the room fills up around him. Smoke, the clash of tea cups and cracked glasses, the hum of accents from all over the map, French and Spanish and Italian.

Slow steady strokes. The blade throws off its scratches and nicks, takes on a life of its own. Cold glittering blue-gray steel that takes in the sooty candlelight and the hopeless smolder of the ashes in the fireplace. He kills with every part of it - point and edge and spine and guard - and it’s his primary weapon, he carries it everywhere, even when the work requires the occasional gun.

He sees to his other blades in much the same fashion: he carries a stiletto in his right sleeve, weighted and scabbarded in such a way that he can drop it into his hand should there be a need for stealth. He checks the point and the plain hilt for wear and tear.

People move their seats away from him when he thrusts the knife forward. The movement is swift and thoughtless, and the stiletto stops less than half an inch away from someone’s back.

“Now, now,” that person drawls as she pours another thimbleful of whiskey into her glass, completely unperturbed, “you would never stab me like that, Mister Erik.”

Erik shrugs and checks his stiletto over again before replacing it in his sleeve. “The day you come clean about your weapons is the day I tell you all about mine, Miz Alix.”

Alix laughs and turns around on her chair, and offers Erik a drink. “How difficult it must be to have to carry so many secrets. Where do you hide yours, I wonder? Perhaps you should turn out your pockets?”

“Nothing in there but a few coins and the screams of my enemies,” Erik says.

“There is a reason why I like you,” Alix declares - but when she gets up there’s a loud noise that sounds like “Ahem” at the door and she turns toward it, as does Erik.

Jean is small and _round_ and squints at the world through ridiculous eyeglasses.

Erik could very nearly consider him a friend, were he not a compulsive pickpocket, or a master forger, or particularly good at killing people with his bare hands.

Jean’s warm smile hides his secrets and means only one thing for the people in this room: _Time for troublemaking._

“Good to see you all again,” Jean says. “Can someone tell me if Alix and Erik are here?”

“Present and accounted for,” Alix says, and raises her right hand.

“Ah, yes, missing tip of ring finger, I guess that _is_ you. There’s a job that needs doing and it needs your particular skill.”

“I like jobs like that. And I suppose Erik is - what? Bait? I don’t do backup, Jean.”

“Neither does he. You will be working together anyway.”

Erik raises an eyebrow, then takes Alix’s glass and downs the drink in one. It burns going down, rough like ashes and sawdust and shattered bone. “I’m here, Jean,” he says, and crosses the room to the table that Jean has claimed.

Alix sits down next to him, muttering faintly to herself.

Jean nods and peers at them both. “Information, as always,” he says, “and you happen to be the best in this room at what you do. I might just kill anyone who says otherwise. This is a task that requires both delicacy and a hammer, and the ability to judge when to switch one for the other.”

“I’m listening,” Alix says.

“You had better. This is a job that involves a list of names.”

Erik scoffs. “Are we to hunt people down? Cross out the names of those who have been dealt with?”

“Actually, you will first need to _find_ the list,” Jean says. “Which means you need to find a man. Unfortunately, we’re not just talking about any man, and we’re not just talking about a simple snatch-and-interrogate.”

“Anyone in here can do that. You want us because it’s difficult. Because we’ve both come back from the dead too many times.”

Jean smirks. “Too right you are, Erik. And you might need to use that particular talent of yours for this particular task, because you’re going after Saverio Sanza.”

There’s a shocked sound behind Erik, quickly smothered.

Alix is suddenly grinning, and the smile must be catching, because Erik is leaning forward and chuckling. “Now I’m interested.”

“Nice of you to come around,” Jean says. “Of course, maybe you’re just interested in the challenge.”

It’s Alix who answers. “When am I not?”

“That’s the spirit. Now, particulars. Sanza’s on his way back home, he’s coming off a successful tour, and the first thing he’s going to want to do is meet with his, ahem, backers. Make a list of the backers. Investigate them. You know the rumors about Sanza. You will likely be able to confirm at least one of them. Find proof. Find the dirt. We can provide the usual resources, cover stories, some of the materials you’ll need. The rest is up to you.”

“All right,” Erik says. “And this list of yours?”

Jean grins his hunter’s grin, the one that has made some of the other people in this room back away in fear or anticipation or surprise, Erik’s never been able to figure out. He likes it when Jean grins this way, because it means trouble, Erik’s kind of trouble, blades and running in dark alleyways and the occasional theft of something small and significant. That grin is one of the few reasons why he even knows this ill-assorted lot at all.

“Just get me the list,” Jean says, and his chair creaks in complaint as he slouches more comfortably into it. “And I’ll see that you’re well compensated for your troubles. You know I usually mean it when I say that.”

Erik nods. “You do. Usually. Do we have a deadline?”

“For someone like Sanza, and because it’s you and Alix? None. Though I expect you to be reasonable and give me some kind of message, even if it’s just to say you might need help or you’re about to be killed?”

Alix chuckles knowingly. “Anything we need to watch out for?”

“I’m sure you’ll be able to do something about the usual crowds of hangers-on,” Jean says, looking mildly amused. “For a famous actor, he seems to have a smaller circle than most.”

*

Erik takes a deep breath and thinks about shutting out the unimaginable din at the bar. Accents and voices all roaring, contributing to the currents visible in the thick blue fog of smokers and drinkers and dancers.

He allows himself one idle moment to wonder _how_ people can dance in this crush at all, when he has to strain to hear the melody coming from the indifferent-looking band on their postage stamp of a stage. They are tucked away into one of the faraway corners. He can just barely hear a faint idea of brassy blaring horns.

The drums are easier to notice, and he makes a show of nodding his head to the distant heavy beat every now and then.

Alix passes by on the arm of yet another suited-up dandy; her hair has fallen out of her pins, and only Erik knows that there is nothing at all genuine or even warm in the adoring expression plastered onto her face, except perhaps for the lines around her eyes.

He looks at his watch, something gaudy and silvery and not at all compatible with his collars and cuffs, and knows that Alix has at least another quarter of an hour to learn the club’s layout, and find him a good position to wait for Sanza and his entourage.

If they’re coming here tonight at all.

Right now she’s just putting on an excellent show of enjoying herself, so Erik shrugs and waves at the bartender for another beer, and keeps cataloguing the strange combinations of people milling around him.

He could almost have sworn that the heavyset blonde a few feet away should have been wearing some kind of white insert in his unfashionable black collar; he looks hunted and unsure and out of his depth. The one thing he has going for him is that he doesn’t exactly seem to be shying away from the slender, sloe-eyed redhead who’s all but pinned to his right side.

On Erik’s other side there are two beautiful women, heads bent together in conversation, eyes locked only on each other. The taller one is dressed in a perfectly starched dress shirt and what looks like tuxedo pants; her crimson bow-tie is hanging undone, and instead of a cummerbund she’s wearing red ribbons tied just above her cuffs. Her hands are planted firmly on her partner’s hips.

When the shorter woman moves, the flickering light shatters and sparks off her silver dress and the red jeweled collar encircling her throat. As he watches, that woman leans up into her tall companion’s space and starts whispering furiously into her ear - and whatever she says ends in both of them dissolving into chiming laughter.

When they start kissing, no one in the club blinks or looks twice in their direction, though he thinks he might hear an appreciative whistle from behind the bar. He turns away after a moment, and fumbles in his pocket for his cigarette case.

Someone murmurs next to him: _“Allumette?”_

 _“Oui,”_ he says, and after the sulfur and the spark he looks at the hand that holds the lighter out to him. Shapely fingers curved gracefully around the weathered and blued metal, fingertips wrapped in smoky-gray lace.

The translucent gloves do nothing to conceal the pale scars on the backs of the woman’s hands, winding around her knuckles.

“Buy me a drink,” she says, low and clarion even with the buzz that keeps inexorably rising between the two of them. “Then we can call it quits.”

Sliding into character is as easy as taking a long, appreciative drag and exhaling it. He catalogs the brief flash of flame as she lights her own cigarette and tucks the lighter away.

White dress, miraculously still pristine in the grime and smoke of this place; it leaves her freckled shoulders bare and clings to hip and knee, just above where the skirt ends in a series of lacy points. The woman is wearing little golden slippers, no hint of a heel at all.

Erik looks at her face and the secrets tucked into half of a smirk: more freckles scattered across her cheekbones, two particularly prominent dark spots on the bridge of her nose. Those freckles are framed by dark curls threaded in several shades of red. The shifting light of the club causes the blue of her eyes to shift as well, dark to darker with every moment. Her lips are very red around the filter of her cigarette.

He smirks back and waves at the bartender. “Two of whatever she’s getting, please,” he says.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” the woman in the white dress asks. “Do you even know what I want to drink?”

“I’ve you to save me if I can’t handle it, yes?”

“If you can’t handle the drink there’ll be more for me,” she declares, flash of something playful and wicked in her eyes. She turns to the bartender. “So it’ll be two Bijous. I want the good gin, mind. You can give everyone else the bathtub swill you lot call alcoholic spirits, but you give me the real stuff.”

“Yes’m,” the man behind the bar says.

“Old-fashioned,” Erik murmurs, when the woman turns back to him.

“I like some old-fashioned things,” she says; whatever else she might have to say is cut off when two glasses are pushed toward her elbow. “Such as these. I drink to your health, stranger, and to finding whatever you’ve come here for.”

He watches her drink and takes only a sip from his own glass. “Are you searching for something here, yourself?”

“No,” she says. “Are you drinking that?”

“I was going to, but you may have it, as you seem to need it more than I do.”

“Obliged.” The woman seems to shiver from head to toe when she finishes off the second Bijou. “You don’t seem concerned by whatever it is I’m doing to myself.”

“Am I to be concerned? The only thing I have a question about is whether all nightclubs make you feel philosophical, or if it’s just this one. Because if it is, it’s a poor place for thinking,” Erik says.

She chuckles, and covers it with one lace-gloved hand. “Maybe it is just this one. I don’t know! This is really only my second time here. In any case, how wonderful of you to notice. People don’t seem to talk much in places like this. They seem so interesting from a distance, but when you hear them say just one silly little word they’re revealed to be dull and foolish. It’s perfectly tiresome is what it is. I would rather be tucked away in a corner with someone interesting.”

“Am I already an interesting man? How can you tell? You’ve barely known me for five minutes.”

“So I have,” she drawls. “But that might well be easily remedied.”

Erik nearly laughs when she tries a smoldering pout on him, because the expression doesn’t quite fit the hint of impishness in her eyes.

He also knows that she’s acting, and that she’s very good at it - she is much better than he is, and she might quite possibly be Alix’s equal.

“- At least I can give you my name,” the woman is saying. “And that means I can trouble you for yours. I’m Jamie.”

He doesn’t even have to think that over to know that that’s not her real name. Still, Erik sketches a very abbreviated bow in her direction. “Michel at your service,” he murmurs.

“I wonder if I should ask you to dance, Michel,” Jamie says. The smile in her eyes dims a little.

“What’s stopping you?”

“Look over your shoulder.”

Erik does.

Alix raises an eyebrow at him. Her hand is still raised so that it’s somewhere in the area of his shoulder. Her fingers would be claws if they could curve any further; as it is, she taps him hard anyway, brief sting of sharp impact. “And I suppose you think you’re actually doing something of consequence?” she hisses. “Some brother you are. Layabout and wastrel and lush.”

He feigns being cowed. “I - I just stopped here for a moment!”

“You’ve been propping the bar up all night,” Alix snaps. “Come along! Aunt Rose will be beside herself with worry now!”

He turns away from Alix’s glare, and doesn’t have to pretend that he suddenly needs to get away. _Aunt Rose_ is a code phrase, and one that he’s been waiting for in the long weeks of staking Sanza out.

He puts on a slightly apologetic expression for Jamie’s benefit. “Perhaps I might be able to see you again.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I only think that you might be some kind of interesting. As to whether you actually are interesting _enough_ , I haven’t decided yet. Not enough evidence. A pity. Go look after your Aunt Rose,” Jamie says.

Her smile is cold, now, and Erik watches a thundercloud shadow fall into those strange eyes as she turns away.

He maneuvers past what feels like everyone in the club, following Alix until she turns into the corridor that leads to the kitchens.

“If you were really getting into that particular conversation - sorry about that,” she says.

As far as Erik can tell, she actually sounds sincere.

That, combined with a very real sense of regret - because even if he can see “Jamie” again, he’d still have Jean’s task to deal with, and there are never any promises for what happens in the short or long time between the beginning of the task and the end of it.

He isn’t keen on the idea of leaving her behind, brittle and broken and bereft.

So it might be better to have just had that brief moment, something incandescent even if it might have all been an act.

He’d pay good money to see that act again, as close as he has been to it tonight.

“It doesn’t matter,” Erik says, even though he’s not fooling himself and he _can’t_ fool Alix. He’s already tried that, and crashed and burned every time.

The feeling is not unlike the small shard of regret that’s taken up residence in his mind.

“Back to work,” he says. “Aunt Rose?”

Alix raises an eyebrow at him, but thankfully follows his lead. “Yes. There’s that, at the very least. This is the right place; we’ve just come on the wrong night. Sanza’s often here on Wednesdays; he seems to have a particular preference for this place.” She looks back at the din and at the crowd and at the bar. “I can’t imagine why.”

“He must have a table, a room, someplace to stay,” Erik says.

“There’s an upstairs,” Alix says. “Through that door and up a flight of stairs.”

“That’s the kitchen.”

“Upstairs as in over the kitchen, yes, I’m aware of that.” She shrugs and wiggles her fingers at him. “The noise is giving me a headache. Give me a cigarette.”

“I don’t have any matches,” Erik says. “Also, this isn’t your kind of noise.”

“Yes, precisely. My kind of noise involves screaming in fear, and things breaking and collapsing and falling down in smoke. So,” she says as she produces a matchbook from her pockets, “are we coming back here next week?”

“If needs must,” Erik says.

He finds himself looking for a flash of white, of gray, of blue, as he shoulders his way towards the club’s exit.

There are voices in the crowd. He listens attentively for a familiar sardonic laugh, for a strange accent, for a woman ordering a Bijou.

A ringing silence, a deafening absence, in the welter of music and noise and laughter.

**Two: A Blade and a Lady**

The note in Erik’s hand is stained with wine, but the address on it is still legible.

Saverio Sanza divides his time between three major addresses: an “official” residence, with the front doors locked and barred against the press and the well-wishers alike; his manager’s office, where the front steps are covered with the debris of letters and ripped-away stamps and cheaply gummed envelopes; and the building that Erik is looking up at now.

Three dingy storeys, the walls still riddled with bullet holes. Smoky windows covered with tattered curtains. A woman sitting on her stoop, sulky eyes stained with sullen darkness. The boy down the block looks no better: the seams on his too-long jacket sag with his shoulders.

Erik glares them both into silence, before they can even begin their slow slurred patter, and they sneer at him in response and look studiously away.

Maybe there is a point to Sanza hiding himself here, in a cheap suite of rooms on a cheap top floor. Maybe people might follow him from place to place, dogging his footsteps looking for whatever it is people claim from their clay-footed idols - but anyone would drag those same feet in a place like this, where the walls are nothing but paper and whitewash; where the floors inevitably dip and the ceilings cannot hope to keep out rain or fog or heat.

Erik thinks he must have been born in a place like this, because it’s what he remembers, because it’s still the kind of place he finds himself in, even when he’s disguised, even when he’s practicing the fine and subtle art of camouflage. _Where_ he is, is irrelevant: ballroom to back alley to barley field.

 _Who_ he is at that moment is more important.

And right now, he is the man looking up at the windows on the fifth floor.

He’s carrying a present from Alix in one of his pockets, tightly buttoned up against the wind and the rain and the crash of impact. He has one of his stilettos in his other sleeve, and his knife, as always, is in the small of his back. The blade is warm like his blood, hot against his skin, and he shifts, casually, to feel its weight. He allows himself a small smile.

The woman vacates her stoop with a vague obscenity, stalking off around the block.

Erik waits until she’s gone before he pretends to tip a nonexistent hat to her.

He waits for the boy to move off, too, before he strides up to the front door of the building; he shoves the door open, and starts making his way up the stairs. It’s slow going, because he has to look everywhere, he has to know he’s not being followed. There are dark stains going up and down the walls. Someone is crying behind one door; someone is laughing uproariously next door to that. There is activity everywhere, and Erik can see shadows moving with him, keeping pace with his stealthy footsteps.

Up to the top: here he’s more careful; he’s paying attention to his surroundings now, and he’s more aware of the weight in his pocket.

 _Blue door,_ Alix’s note says, _wedge the small square between the doorframe and the knob BEFORE you hit the switch._

Erik braces himself for impact: a quiet _smash_ of an explosion, which scatters fragments of wood up and down the corridor, well past his position where he’d put his hands over his ears.

No one notices. No one comes into the corridor.

The silence on the top floor seems to have spread to the rest of the building.

Erik counts the seconds off in his head, hoping he doesn’t have to fight anyone; he’s never liked delays.

What he hears, however, when someone finally decides to react, is more than enough to nearly cut him off at the knees.

“Hell and _damnation_.”

Perhaps there is no smoky or sultry undertone to this voice, but he’d still recognize it anywhere.

“I’m going to give her a damn piece of my _mind_ \- ”

Erik draws both of his blades, and takes a deep breath, and makes for the ruined door. It hangs crazily from the remains of one hinge.

The rooms are in shambles, treacherous underfoot, shadows pooling in every corner.

One of those shadows moves toward him.

Erik advances, knives first. He’s on high alert now. The world slows down around him, because he’s about to get into a fight. He can feel the blood rushing in his veins. He can almost see into the darkness.

But it’s the breath that warns him, because his opponent is stepping towards him on nearly noiseless feet, and Erik lunges and parries and the sharp rasping impact is of blade against blade: a knife like his, gleaming new, except for the pommel that is already stained dark.

“Damn!” the unseen woman mutters.

Erik feels more than sees her attempt to throw her weight against him, bear him downwards.

If he can’t fool Alix he can always outfight her with his hands and feet, and his current opponent is no exception: Erik feints with the knife and strikes with the stiletto.

Contact. Impact. He’s down, suddenly, and there is a weight on his wrist. There isn’t enough light to tell him where his weapon’s gone.

A familiar sizzle-hiss. This time he wrinkles his nose at the stench of sulfur and brimstone.

Flicker of flame. Astonished dark eyes. The rooms are so full of shadows that it’s nearly impossible to see colors - but he thinks the blue and the red are there and are familiar.

He smiles despite the blade at his throat. “Is your name really Jamie?”

“I don’t really have a name any more,” the woman hisses. Her teeth are very white even in the poor flame of the match, which gutters once and then dies, just missing singeing her fingertips. “Do you have one?”

“Maybe,” Erik says.

Her face is still lit up with incandescent rage when she strikes a second match. “You’re in my way.”

“And you are in mine. Are we going to do something about it?”

She smiles, then, a thin sliver of madness. “You can stay under my foot, or you can die. I don’t particularly care so long as it’s by my hand. Because you are distracting me. I don’t tolerate distractions.”

Erik grins. “I happen to like a distraction, especially when it’s as well-turned as you.”

“Flattery,” she sneers. “I like that even less.”

“So what do you like?”

“You out of my way. Gone, dead, conveniently disposed of. I have a job to do here and you aren’t the spanner I intend to throw into the works.”

“Now that’s a waste of resources,” Erik says. “Obviously you’re after Sanza or someone in his clique. You and I might want the same thing. You don’t need help, that much is clear. But I’m prepared to offer it anyway, if you’d be so kind as to let me up.”

The woman laughs. Soft, chilling, sweet. “And what, pray tell, gives you the impression that I’m capable of _kindness_?”

She leans over, and the shadow in her eyes is something that Erik has seen before: it’s something terrifying, and it’s something he’s become familiar with and wishes he hadn’t.

A mad blue something: Erik has seen it in his mirror, colored gray and green.

And he has seen it in the eyes of dead men and women, usually in the last few moments of lives terminated under extreme duress, with the echoes of screams still stubbornly refusing to fade away.

But there can be no comparisons between his own madness and the one that thrums through this woman’s every word, every look, every movement: the madness that makes her smile prettily and press the knife closer to his throat.

He should be afraid, Erik thinks.

He should be running away.

Instead he moves, slowly, deliberately, telegraphing all of his movements: he grasps the hand holding the knife, and pushes it away.

“I should kill you,” the woman says.

“I know.” It is the truth. “You could have killed me at the nightclub.”

“If I had thought to bring poison with me, yes.”

Erik nods. This is entirely unsurprising. “And you could still kill me at any time.”

“I could make you kill yourself,” she breathes. “Make you plunge that blade of yours into your heart. You would smile for me, wouldn’t you.”

He does. “I would.”

She shifts again once he’s on his feet: she clicks her tongue, petulant, annoyed, and looks up into his eyes. “Must you be so tall?”

He shrugs.

“Everyone else is tall. I am not. All the better to hide in plain sight with,” she says. “I’ll take your name from you now, since I am apparently not taking your life. Your _real_ name, mind.”

“Some people know me as Max,” he says easily. “But my real name is Erik. Erik Lehnsherr.” He thinks about it, and adds, “Yourself?”

For some reason the woman pouts. “I said I didn’t have a name.”

“What do I call you?”

She seems almost petulant as she sheathes her knife and crosses her arms. “Must you - I - _hmmmph_. Charlotte. Xavier.”

“Thank you. It’s very nice to meet you,” Erik says as he looks around for his stiletto. “One more question, if I may.”

She glares at him, winter-blue. “I’m surprised you’re still alive to ask stupid questions.”

Erik almost smiles. “My mother told me I had no instinct for self-preservation.”

“And you carry a knife? You attempt to sneak up on people who can kill you? Are you lucky or are you cursed or are you an idiot?”

“I believe I’ve been called all three. Now, my question - ?”

Even in the tattered light he can still see the expressions shifting on that terrible and beautiful face. “I know what your question is,” she snaps. “Papers. Some kind of trail that links Saverio Sanza to a list of underworld organizations as long as my arm.”

“The rumors have been around for years,” Erik agrees.

“I just want the trail.”

“I am also looking for it.”

Charlotte looks like she might want to spit. “And you think that I’ll ask for help? You think that you _can_ help?”

“I’m another pair of eyes, another set of hands,” Erik says.

“I don’t care. I work alone. Go away,” Charlotte says, and she draws her knife again so she can gesture at the broken door. “Out. And the next time I see you, you had better attempt to kill me. Because if you don’t, I _will_ take your life.”

He closes his mouth, and goes.

*

“I’m rather impressed you came back alive,” Alix says, after Erik gives her a very sketchy outline of the encounter in Sanza’s bolthole. “If this girl really did fight you to a standstill, I’d like to meet her. I’d buy her a drink.”

“She drinks Bijous,” Erik says.

“And what is that when it’s at home?”

“Before your time and mine, apparently.”

Alix snorts. “Women are strange, and I say that as a peculiar and very outspoken representative of that very same species. Did the bomb work?”

“Yes,” Erik says, for perhaps the third time. “Like I said. It tore the door down. There wasn’t much of it left, after.”

“I intended for the _whole door_ to be gone, with a minimum of fuss, a minimum of noise.”

Erik looks over, only mildly surprised; he watches Alix tap the broken-off end of a pencil against her cheek. “Maybe you have a lot more in common with Jamie than I thought.”

“How’s that?” Alix asks. She raises an eyebrow without looking in Erik’s direction.

“Burn the world down, dance in the ashes.”

Alix laughs.

*

Jean sends them a message after another week of fruitless surveillance: _My sympathies on the difficulties that you have been encountering. However, I continue to have all faith in your talents. I think this would be a good time to suggest a different set of tactics. The attack direct, perhaps?_

_Enclosed with this letter are two tickets to an upcoming film festival. Get yourselves some glad rags and bring all of your weapons. The rest of the details I leave up to you. Good luck._

“Have you any objections to me wearing a suit?” Alix asks as she peruses the note.

“None at all,” Erik says.

“Good, because carrying explosives is murder on skirts and uselessly pretty shoes, it really is.”

*

“Are we meeting up here, or at the flat?” Alix whispers.

Erik very nearly doesn’t hear her over the scudding rush of a sudden storm. “Back to the flat when you’re done. There’s no sense in getting soaked.”

“If you get back before I do, be a dear and put the kettle on.”

“Make your own damn tea.”

Alix laughs softly. “On second thought, I shall follow your learned advice. I forget that you’ve burned water numerous times. You’re not getting anywhere near my Lady Grey.”

The last words are drowned out in the all-encompassing sensation of heat and wet and humidity; Erik jams his hat down on his head and crosses the street.

There are people moving in the shadows of the theater. Erik glances at the pair who trot past him: the one with a box marked FRAGILE complains loudly about the weather and about movie audiences; the one with the two oversized vases suffers silently through his task.

The upper storeys of the theater have vanished into the night, into the rain.

At least there will be many, many hiding places, Erik thinks. Perhaps too many of them, in fact. Now that he knows that he and Alix aren’t the only ones hunting Sanza, he’s had to spend some thought on the idea of who else might want the actor dead or gone or both.

He remembers Charlotte’s voice muttering about at least one co-worker: henchman or controller or underling, he’s not sure which.

He pays particular attention to the small door on the southern side of the building. It opens out onto a narrow side-street that ends in a cramped blind alley, just enough space to drive a car in and open its doors.

Is it a way into the theater, Erik thinks as he approaches the southern door, or is it a way out?

He produces Alix’s lockpicks from his pocket and opens the door carefully, silently.

He feels his way down the dark corridor, and curses the rain: he could have used some thunder so he can listen for echoes; he could have used some lightning, even if it would have played merry hell with his low-light vision.

He has to content himself with the occasional splash of light: perhaps one out of every ten lamps is in use. Each step is into new and deeper pools of unyielding shadow. He has to trust in whatever vestige of luck he’s been carrying around with him, so that he doesn’t run into anything. So that he doesn’t wind up giving the game away before he’s ready.

When he finds an assortment of boxes stacked neatly next to one of the entrances into the gallery, he picks up the top two and carries them in.

No one looks at him once he pushes his way into the empty dress circle.

He all but drops the boxes next to the door and walks in the direction of the stage. He turns around slowly on the spot, trying to memorize what details the bad light can reveal. At least twenty rows of stalls on the ground, separated by three aisles; at least four galleries. The curtains on the boxes are all drawn closed.

He’s about to turn around to take a good look at the stage when there’s a knife in the small of his back.

He raises his empty hands to shoulder level, slowly, and waits.

Just as he starts wondering about whether he’ll know who his opponent is, her voice calls up strange echoes from the distant walls, the invisible dome of the roof.

“I remember I said I’d kill you if I ever saw you again,” Charlotte mutters.

There’s a coiled energy crackling through the quiet words.

Erik risks a glance over his shoulder.

It takes him a moment to register what he is looking at.

Charlotte is dressed as one of the workers he’d passed by in the downpour. Her hair is tucked untidily into an oversized cap. There are large damp patches on her shoulders and on her arms.

She is sporting the remains of what looks like one hell of a shiner: yellow and green ring, mottled and terrible around one vivid blue eye.

He can see the colors against her pale skin, against the constellations of freckles and the pale lines of scars - all of it in one rapid glance that is suddenly terminated when she hisses at him.

“Eyes front.”

Erik takes a deep breath, suddenly conscious of the movement of the air through his lungs, the rush of it in his head, the pulse of his blood. “I’m working.”

Charlotte growls, “Working, yes, and _in my way_. I made that clear. You’re trouble. You’re sticking your nose in where it’s emphatically not needed. I have little mercy for the tools I cast aside. Less, for the obstacles standing between me and my goal. And you’re worse than those two things. You’re _competition_.”

He tries to reason with her again. “Like I said before. The offer still stands. If you need help, I’m prepared to offer it.”

“Do you know what I do to my - confederates?”

“I can guess,” Erik says. “You disappear them.”

“Delicately put,” Charlotte sneers. Her laugh should have been tinkling, should have been amused, but the echoes throw back something dark and hoarse and angry. “And, incidentally, perfectly correct. I’m not a fool. I know who you and your associate are. I know who you’re with and I am compelled to tell you the truth, which is that Jean is a fool and an idealist, and that he is unscrupulous with all of you to boot.”

Erik shrugs. Some of her accusations are true.

“Which makes you - what? Some other crusader. Blind and misled and misbegotten. A waste!”

“Please don’t bring my family into this,” Erik complains.

“Because?”

“Because you’ve already identified me, Charlotte.”

The silence is brief and startled and it leaves Erik reeling, because it’s the first time he’s called her by her name - her real name - and the syllables of it are sweet and heavy and painful in his mouth.

The moment is suddenly and decisively shattered when someone begins to shout outside the dress circle: “Nobody calls the cops! You deal with it yourselves!”

“That is likely your associate,” Charlotte mutters. There are lines in her face, now, pulled together into a reluctant scowl. “Go. Before I change my mind.”

“Perhaps I’ll see you tomorrow,” Erik says - and he takes a long step away from the knife at his back before he whirls around and starts running. Out of the auditorium. Away from the figure of Charlotte in the aisle, a dark shadow in the dim light of the space.

Somehow he makes it past all the men and back out on the street. The falling rain quickly plasters his hair down. He’s lost his hat, and probably most of his wits - all that remains will have to be enough as he tears down the sidewalk, looking for any tell-tale groups of people.

He darts around a man and woman huddled under an umbrella and splashes through a series of puddles, water sloshing around in his shoes, before someone calls out to him: “Here!”

He ducks into another alley, toward a flash of pale skin.

There’s a spot of blood in the corner of Alix’s mouth.

“Is there anyone still after you?” Erik asks.

“I got them,” she says with a lopsided smile that is also half a grimace.

“All right. Come on.” He tucks her under his arm.

“We’re still working tomorrow,” Alix says after a while. “Or is it later. I’ve lost track of the time.”

Erik nods. “We’re still going to try for Sanza later. So you’re patching up and I’m going to take the entire night’s watch.”

“I owe you.”

“I’ll collect.”

*

Erik has old habits and old instincts, different from self-preservation and tending to be much more useful. He has a fair approximation of a steeltrap memory and he trains it every chance he gets. He does his best to memorize entrances and exits and possible weapons wherever he might find himself, because he never knows when a leg off a broken table or the shards of glass from a shattered window or the very dirt beneath his feet will be useful, and he never underestimates the tools he encounters, be they improvised or makeshift or creatively repurposed. He observes everything, favoring thoroughness over speed, and he might fail to see the greater picture sometimes but he always knows what his part ought to be, even when that part changes from moment to moment.

He brings all of those skills to bear on their current situation now, and if it is odd to consider himself a weapon dressed in lightweight wool and crisp cotton, he thinks of himself as one anyway. The evening dress is camouflage; it will help him reach the place where he must do battle.

All around him is a crush of well-dressed men and women, top hats and glittering jewelry and who knew what manner of social niceties: a perfumed throng, but a throng nonetheless, and it must be one of the immutable laws of the universe that Erik will always find himself in the middle of a crowd.

He already finds it difficult to deal with considerably smaller groups, or with the sorts of people he’s become familiar with through the years of his work.

He conceals his distaste with some difficulty, and thinks of his task instead: he’s well and truly in the lion’s den now.

At least he has backup today.

The wounds from last night have been skillfully covered up, and Alix beams at his side, tall and incongruous and stylish, dressed to draw everyone’s eyes. Where she procured the suit Erik doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know, but it’s a masterpiece all the same. Three pieces in subdued herringbone, dark blue over a flash of crimson silk. He’s seen her run in higher heels so he’s not going to question her over the shoes she’s wearing.

“Everyone’s looking at you,” he mutters.

“Which is the point, really,” she says. “We both know you want to be invisible. So long as you look like you’re correctly dressed, no one will see you - and if no one sees you, you can jolly well do whatever you want.”

“Thank you?”

“Thank me if we get out of this - ”

No sooner are the words out of her mouth than there’s a stir in the crowd, an echo of a name rippling through the inane chatter: “Sanza!”

“That’s our cue,” Alix says.

Erik lets the words wash over him, and keeps an eye out for trouble instead.

It is more easily said than done, however, to slough off the feeling of having a target pinned to the back of his head.

When Sanza’s entourage passes by, Erik mutters, “I still think he looks like half a drowned river rat.”

“That’s because you have no taste,” is Alix’s tart reply. “Good thing the work doesn’t require you to have it. Come on, let’s try to get closer.”

The movement sweeps the two of them up the stairs and into the foyer of the theater. The throng jostles politely after them.

Erik looks around; the walls and ceiling are draped in white cloth, and that is about all the change that has been made out here. “We need to get you inside as soon as possible,” he says. “You remember the layout?”

“Crystal,” Alix says.

“You’re going to have to find some way of letting me know when you’re going to make your move.”

She actually laughs in his face, then. “Oh, trust me, you’ll know.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Do try to restrain yourself from bringing this place down around my ears.”

“I’ll think about it,” Alix snaps, and she presses a kiss to the air next to his cheek and slides away.

Erik squares his shoulders and passes through into the dress circle. Eyes sweeping through the crowd, methodical, considered. Sanza and his party are in the second row. A handful of men with the grim and bored expressions of bodyguards are standing along the walls. The babble of voices here is nearly as loud as the din coming down from the galleries.

When he looks up to the one box that’s in use he quickly realizes that he’s not the only one looking: Sanza himself is staring up at the opened curtains with what looks like some kind of consternation on his face.

When the house lights are dimmed and the uncertain flickering light of the actor’s film fills up the auditorium, Erik tunes out the faces looking at the screen, and waits as best as he can.

When a hand lands on his shoulder he doesn’t start, but not by much. He’s less than an inch away from going for a weapon; he’s only got his stilettos on him now but they’re in their usual sheaths, hidden in the sleeves of the dinner jacket that hangs just a little loosely from his shoulders.

Charlotte smiles at him, close-lipped and very nearly sweet.

He could almost believe that she knows how to look innocent, that she’s been that innocent.

He doesn’t question the instinct that makes him rise from his seat; it’s as if she’s the other end of a string that is tied around his heart, that’s hooked into his very bones, and she must lead and he must follow.

Back out into the foyer. Erik blinks rapidly to adjust to the relative brightness, and levels a look at Charlotte.

Against the faded polish and flaking gilt of the foyer the shadowed blue of her gown is very nearly expected. The lace in her hair and on her hands is familiar, too, as is the fading remnants of her bruise, still visible in the corner of her eye where she’s missed a spot with her makeup.

What is unexpected is the honestly amused smile gracing her lips. “You should have told me what you were planning to do,” she says.

Erik snorts. “I _did_ , actually, thank you very much for forgetting. Or maybe you really should have just forgotten, because when I told you who my target was all I got out of it was a threat on my life.”

“It’s still on the table,” Charlotte says. “But to more important matters. I know where Alix is, I know what she’s doing, but I don’t know when she’s going to attack. I need to know that.”

“How do you even know - ”

He gets an extravagant eye-roll for his pains. “I _spoke_ to her, honestly, what were you thinking? I am capable of lucid conversation. Sometimes. She told me she didn’t know a Bijou from Adam but she’d be happy to buy me one.”

And just like that, he has to shake his head. She’s telling the truth - for now. Maybe Alix is bound and gagged in a closet somewhere and he has every intention of going to find her, if he can, if Charlotte releases him. But at least he can talk about true things for now. “All right. So that means you managed to talk to her. If you did, then why are you asking me?”

“Because she told me to,” Charlotte says, with a familiar petulant light in her eyes.

He shouldn’t smile, especially not in the presence of someone he knows is mercurial _at best_ , but he does, and though he quickly turns his head and covers the smile he can’t stop himself from being amused. He manages to cover up the first burst of laughter as a cough.

Then Charlotte sighs.

Erik turns his back on her in a hurry and starts laughing, deep and helpless guffaws, and all the while he’s expecting her to leap on him and run him through, let him bleed out and then do the same to Alix.

Charlotte says, sulky and silky, “If I’d known that that was what you looked like when you were happy, amused, whatever it is that’s making you act like a child.... Do you know you look absolutely frightening?”

“You wouldn’t be the first to tell me that,” Erik says, gasping through the last of the laughter-spasms.

It takes him a few more minutes to get over and by then he can hear Charlotte tapping her foot, a counterpoint to his pulse, which is still pounding from the adrenaline rush.

“If you’re quite finished - ”

“I can’t actually answer your question,” Erik says.

Charlotte scowls. “Why not?”

“Because Alix never told me when, either. I asked her when we walked away from each other in this very place. All she said was, I’ll know that it’s time when it’s time. Not a moment before.”

Silence hangs between them for a moment.

“So - we wait,” Charlotte mutters rebelliously.

“You can watch the film if you like,” Erik says.

“No. I’d rather have someone attempt to gouge my eyes out with a blunt knife.”

“Must you be so unnecessarily vivid?”

Charlotte half-sneers. “I haven’t even started yet.”

“I don’t want to start,” Erik says, and he turns toward the doors, already reaching for his cigarettes.

She’s at his side at an instant. “I want one.”

“I’m thinking about it.”

She holds her hand out, palm up.

“I know you’re armed,” Erik snorts. “So don’t tell me you’re not carrying anything else. Where’s your lighter?”

Just as she opens her mouth to retort, though, there’s a whisper of movement at Erik’s side and a familiar flash of crimson. “Hello, Alix,” he says instead. It’s only after he turns around that he adds: “What are you doing here, again?”

Alix looks pleased with herself, despite the smudges of dirt on her white collar. “Because I’m ready for trouble, aren’t you?”

Erik chuckles, despite himself. “If it’s my kind of trouble, then yes, always.”

“It’s yours and it’s mine,” she says. “Hello, again, Charlotte.”

Charlotte says, “Hello, Alix. I assume you’d be so kind as to tell us when it’s time to run, or when it’s time to grab people, and by people I mean - ”

“Just you wait,” Alix says. “I’ve got it all wrapped up for you and me and him too.”

“So I’m the third wheel, now,” Erik says, pretending to be put-upon.

“It’s only what you deserve. Alix is much more polite than you are,” Charlotte says. “Do _you_ have cigarettes, Alix?”

“And a box of matches, but I will thank you to step out the doors before we light anything,” Alix says. “This place isn’t safe for anyone, now.”

“Then it’s my kind of place,” Charlotte says, and then the screaming begins.

**Three: Conversations In A Locked Room**

Erik has learned this much from working on and off with Jean’s tatterdemalion crew of strangers and misfits and killers: _there are a hundred thousand ways to skin a cat._

Especially when the skinning procedure in question involves an interrogation.

Some of the irregulars conduct an interrogation as though it were a casual lunchtime conversation, or as if it were a first meeting over coffee and cakes and perhaps a glass of wine. There are social smiles and little secrets involved; the air grows thick with white lies. They speak sweetly and politely to the people they’re extracting information from, and they nod and laugh when the person bound in the chair returns lilt for lilt and compliment for compliment.

Alix’s technique is roughshod and equally effective. Blank disinterest is the name of her game, and the more flustered or irritated or despondent her victim grows the more blase she acts. She plays a game of patience, seemingly immobile and seemingly unmovable, as long as she’s got cigarettes and, on occasion, a glass or two of strong liquor to hand. Even her threats are delivered in a dry voice, completely level, as though she were discussing the prices of tea in China.

Erik never really bothers with questions himself: he often goes straight to the skinning, actual or metaphorical. Easy to undo a knot of silence, of secrecy, of obstinacy, when it’s possible to tease the knot open with a knife, if not just cut it entirely.

Here, now, he’s on the sidelines with Alix, and the show is in the far corner of a bedroom with cracked and peeling wallpaper, with a sagging steel frame bereft of its mattress - a skeleton with a skeleton’s usual hideous grin.

In the far corner are Charlotte and Sanza: she’s standing, startlingly imposing for all that she is in her stocking feet and a plain pinstriped frock. He’s sitting, tied hand and foot into a rickety chair that’s missing half its seat and seems ready to tumble over at any minute.

Charlotte is talking, now, and Erik only has the movements of her mouth to go on - but even he can tell that there must be nothing at all left of the human in her questions. Even he can tell that there is no life in her eyes as she pries out her victim’s secrets, one by one.

Alix offers him a drink, and he refuses it politely, and he doesn’t move away when she comes to stand next to him. They’re in the doorway of the room, a few feet away from Charlotte. The house groans in every breeze. They leave footprints in the dust caking the floors. What little sunlight comes in through the cracked and warped glass in the windows is weak and pale, not even enough to illuminate all of the floating motes.

“Is it me,” she mutters, “or is it getting colder?”

Erik looks over his shoulder, in the direction of the nearest window. The rain beats a melancholy tattoo of shadows and humidity and falling temperatures against the unwashed glass. “It’s not cold, but it will be,” he concedes after a moment. “What makes you think she has something to do with it?”

Alix shrugs and downs half of the drink in her glass. It smells like astringent and like wood chips. “I guess I just find her strange.”

“If it’s any consolation,” Erik offers, lighting his new cigarette off the butt of the old, “I can’t figure her out, either, and I think you already think that I’m wasting too much time on it.”

Alix smirks. “Oh, yes, good job stating the obvious. So let’s return one obvious thing for another. Erik, far be it from me to comment on your taste - because as far as I’m concerned, you haven’t got any, and you’ve never had any - but wanting someone like her could be. Well. Hazardous to your health?”

He shoots a sidelong glance at Alix, and watches Alix shoot him a sidelong glance of her own.

“Quiet,” Charlotte snaps, suddenly.

Erik looks back just in time to watch Charlotte invade Sanza’s space: small as she is, she does a thorough and disconcerting job of looming over her captive.

“Ignore the peanut gallery,” Charlotte hisses. “There’s only you and me here and _I_ am in charge, and I’ll be happy to remind you of that - repeatedly. Painfully - ”

“Please don’t - please don’t - ” is all Sanza can say.

Charlotte sneers. “I won’t if you will. So _talk_ already. I do not have much patience to begin with, and because of you I’m running very, _very_ low.”

The answer to that is panicked blubbering, wordless and shaking. “I - please - save me - I - ”

Erik is familiar with fear; he’s seen it in other faces, he’s seen it in Alix’s, he’s seen it in his own face.

Sanza’s about to come apart at the seams: sweat stains up and down his shirt, eyes wide open so even Erik can see the whites showing all around his eyes. He’s fighting the knots that Alix had tied and Erik had double- and triple-checked, to no avail.

He might have to open the windows in the next hour or so, because who knows when Sanza’s going to lose control of his bodily functions.

Human bodies can be predictable and tiresome sometimes.

“All that without a knife - I could almost admire her,” Alix mutters at his side.

Erik shrugs. He’s a little disappointed, himself. He’d been told they were dealing with someone who was a little too polished at hiding secrets; he’d been looking forward to taking over from Charlotte, if she could be persuaded to think about human things such as food and water and sleep.

They’ve been here just two days, and Charlotte has been at Sanza for four hours, and Erik is seriously starting to wonder if there’ll be anything left of the man come the evening.

“Let’s see if you can use your words when I try this again,” Charlotte is saying, when he blinks back to the present - just in time to see her turn halfway away from Sanza, just in time for her to twist and throw all the momentum of shoulder and torso and hip into the _vicious_ backhanded slap. The crack of it echoes for several moments, even over the man’s sobs, even over the sudden runaway beat of Erik’s own heart.

Charlotte walks up to Alix and smiles, and for a wonder she looks just a little bit _alive_. “That might have been a little too much, do you think?”

Alix rallies rapidly, and offers her the last of the liquor. “I think that if you’re having fun, no one has the right to tell you that it’s too much or it’s too little.”

“Fun? Hardly. He’s starting to bore me, and he has terrible personal hygiene.”

“Better you than me, then,” Alix chuckles.

Charlotte frowns, and then pouts, and then pushes past both of them.

“Left to go to the loo, right to go to the kitchen,” Alix says. “In case it’s slipped your mind.”

“I believe it has. Ta very much,” is the weary answer, slow drawl.

“You’re actually friends,” Erik says into the silence.

“ _Hardly_ ,” Alix all but snorts. “No one could be friends with _that_. I just recognize her for what she is. She and I are kin. We are killers. We just happen to be women. Cigarette, please.”

“I’d hardly forget she’s deadly; she’s claimed to be holding my life in her hands.”

“So keep that in mind. Don’t think about the blue eyes.” He watches Alix blow a stream of blue smoke in Sanza’s direction. “And I don’t have to be looking at you to know you’re about to contradict me, so let me stop you right there, save you the trouble.”

“Am I just supposed to stand here and let you slander me?” Erik says, resigned to the idea anyway.

“It’s not slander if I’m telling the truth,” Alix says.

“All right, all right. Have at it.”

She rolls her eyes. “I don’t need the permission, but thank you all the same. Tell me, Erik, why are you trying to figure this one out?”

“Charlotte or Sanza?”

He gets a swat on his arm for that, and a thoroughly dirty look. “You _know_ who I’m talking about.”

Erik puts his hands in his pockets. “Yes, I do. And the answer to that is, I really wish I could tell you. I’m not being disingenuous. I’m just telling you that I can’t figure out why I want to figure her out.”

“You’ve never run into anyone like that before.”

“Please don’t be absurd. I deal with you, don’t I?”

“And yet everyone else in Jean’s group has propositioned me except you.” Alix chuckles. “Which, before anything else and everything else, I happen to be grateful for. It does become tedious, fending off clumsy inept lines left right and center.”

“I can’t tell you why you’re not my type, Alix,” Erik says.

“I don’t want to know. I just want to know about you and Charlotte.”

“Nosy. I don’t know. I just don’t. Perhaps you should pray, if you do, that I don’t get killed before I figure things out for myself.”

“I pray perhaps once a year, if at that, and even if I did it more often I certainly wouldn’t waste limited resources on you,” Alix laughs.

Erik smiles and shakes his head. “Thank you, Alix.”

“I wish I could ask if I’d missed something,” Charlotte suddenly says from behind the two of them, “but succumb to my earthly needs I must before I can do anything else. I am also tired of staring at Sanza’s face. Can either of you cook?”

Erik follows a laughing Alix into the kitchen. “Is it that you can’t cook, Charlotte,” she asks, “or is it that you won’t?”

“I’m certainly not telling you.”

“You’re not? Well, I can’t either,” Alix says. “So it will have to be starvation, unless we can find things like whiskey and bourbon and gin.”

When she sits down in a rickety chair at the kitchen table, its thin surface riddled with cracks and fissures, Charlotte could almost look like some perfectly respectable young woman come for coffee and a chat - except that she is playing with a knife. The wan light flashes weakly off the blade as she passes it between her hands, slowly and then rapidly, oscillation, careless dexterity.

Erik watches Alix toss Charlotte another knife, and another, so they’re juggling the steel between their four hands, and he rolls his eyes, muttering, “ _Children,_ ” before stepping out of the door.

*

It is also Erik’s idea to have dinner just outside arm’s reach of the still-bound Sanza - an idea that earns him an amused snort from Charlotte and an admiring comment from Alix: “Stooping so low so early in the game, that’s unexpected - and yet I’m not really surprised.”

“I don’t feel like wasting any more time,” Erik says, casually menacing, as he portions out the coarse brown bread and the passable cheese, a few wrinkled apples. “I’m here to get my answers and I’ll get them any way I can, and I’m not above inventing a few new tricks if it’ll get me what I want.”

“Hear, hear,” Charlotte mutters, and she holds out her hand impatiently for the wine. As soon as he uncorks it she all but snatches it from him and takes a long drink straight from the bottle, leaving a vivid red stain across her mouth.

“I cannot actually find any problems with that line of reasoning,” Alix adds around a bite of bread.

They throw the bits of rind from the cheese and the cores from the apples in Sanza’s direction, though none of them actually hit him with their refuse.

When they’re down to the stained brown paper, rough sandpaper texture, Erik wads the lot up into a ball and flicks that at Sanza, as well. It hits him on his shoulder and bounces right off.

All the response that gets him is a hiss and a visible rippling movement in hunched-over shoulders. Their prisoner is slumped in his bonds. His hands are no longer clenched into fists.

Erik gets up, and goes to stand in front of Sanza, and stares down for a long moment, before he looks back at the others.

He raises an eyebrow at an expectant Alix, and she nods, once, in return.

“When are you going to let me have a turn,” she drawls, deliberately speaking with slow emphasis. “I want to hear him sing for me.”

Erik opens his mouth to ask the next question, because this is part of a double act that he sometimes performs with her, but of all the things it’s Charlotte who jumps in with the perfect next line: “I wonder if he takes requests.”

Again, Alix rallies beautifully. “I’m partial to _Il trovatore_. Yourself?”

“ _Carmen_ ,” and Charlotte smiles and fidgets and looks like she’s about to laugh - and Erik can see the cold spark in her eyes, and believes every gesture anyway. “Do you think that we can teach him to sing that song about the rebellious bird?”

Alix blinks, and then grins, and then exclaims, “I like the way you think! And as long as we’re on the subject, what are your thoughts on him reaching the high notes, if we teach him _Vincerò_?”

There’s a panicked sound, and Erik looks back down in time to see naked fear burning up the lines and the creases in Sanza’s face. There is nothing handsome in that notorious face, now; and as Erik watches the humanity seems to bleed away, too: muscles and nerves a-tic from narrow forehead to pointed chin. Tears in those eyes.

Charlotte rises to her feet and makes a pretty little curtsey to Alix. “I would never have thought to make him sing the unknown prince. I concede the point and the battlefield to you.”

Alix laughs, and gets to her feet, and throws one of the blunt kitchen knives back to Charlotte - who then pivots in what is now a familiar motion.

Erik catches the flash of intent in her blue eyes and orders himself sternly to stay in place, because she’s not aiming for him. She’s not, she’s not - but he still flinches, just a little, when the knife lands less than an inch away from Sanza’s foot and the leg of the chair.

The force of the throw leaves the blade trembling for at least a good long minute - and that must be long enough for Sanza to process what is happening around him because he then begins to keen, high and wordless and burning.

Alix slinks over, touches Erik’s shoulder gently to warn him of her approach. Cold-eyed, she regards Sanza for a moment, before she puts a finger to the dark smile upon her lips.

Sanza’s wail cuts off, hastily strangled, and the silence that falls is almost physical, like a millstone thrown onto Erik’s shoulders.

“Mind,” Alix murmurs, “we’re just speculating, that girl and I, and I warn you she is as bloodthirsty as she is strong. You can feel the mark on your own face; I don’t have to tell you anything. And yet she has conceded the matter of you to me. Do you know what you are in for? She wanted you to talk for your own good, my bit player. She wanted to _save_ you. Allow me to introduce myself.”

Erik smiles and walks away as Alix leans over to whisper in Sanza’s ear.

He’s heard that entire speech and the quiet rejoinder at the end - he thinks he should have it memorized by now.

Sanza doesn’t scream, only gulps desperately for his every succeeding breath - wet sounds, pathetic, helpless.

When he passes Charlotte she hands him the bottle.

He doesn’t even stop - he keeps heading out of the room, away from Alix and from their prisoner. As he drinks down the dregs, he allows himself a moment to imagine Charlotte’s red mouth on him, murmuring dark promises against the skin of his throat, against the flutter of the blood, the words punctuated by the sharp whisper-kiss of steel and the bright tang of copper and iron.

Charlotte falls in beside him. “I did expect him to scream when she looked at him like that. Like she was going to tear his heart out.”

“No matter how many times I see her look like that I’m always surprised that she doesn’t follow through,” Erik says. “And it isn’t as if she can’t do it.”

“Has she already? Torn out a heart?”

“She’s come close.”

The answer to that is a thoughtful silence, and in that silence he gestures her up the stairs to the attic. Shadows hunker down in every corner. The roof has been pierced, small and jagged holes in some places and larger ones in others, and the shadowy light they let in is colored exactly like the wine.

Charlotte stops in the center of the attic. Back still to Erik, she murmurs, “How long does Alix take when it’s her turn?”

“As long as it takes,” Erik says. “She’s patient, and she’s wily, and she’s thorough.”

“And how many times have you come down to find her standing next to a corpse?”

“I won’t ask how you know that. The answer is: too many times.”

Charlotte laughs softly. There’s a sharp little music in her voice now. “Would your precious Jean mind if I stole her away from you and from him?”

“You’re welcome to her,” Erik says, and he chuckles, as well, as he lingers near the top of the stairs. “I don’t give a damn about what Jean thinks, and you don’t give a damn what I think.”

“Good answer,” is her whispered reply. “But the wrong one. Incomplete.”

Erik looks her up and down as she turns back toward him. “How’s that,” he whispers back.

“I don’t give a damn about what you think because I already _know_.” Charlotte’s hand is at her throat, and it moves down, swiftly, brisk snap of movement.

Too late Erik remembers that the pinstriped dress sports a row of buttons down the front - he’d have given equal odds on the damn things being decorative, but he’s rapidly being disabused of the notion, because the cloth hanging off Charlotte’s shoulders opens wider and wider.

Seams and pale lace, a brassiere and a girdle and the startling contrast of the black garter belt. Soft clicking noises as Charlotte undoes the clips keeping her stockings in place.

“Are you going to do nothing at all,” she murmurs, rough derision in the drawl of it.

Erik steps forward, hypnotized; more clips and clasps come undone and he can catch glimpses of her bare skin, now. The freckles on her face and throat fan down, and down: tiny shadow-shapes, scattershot, lines and clusters interrupted by her girdle and then appearing again on her thighs, her knees.

The attic is full of musty smells and Charlotte undercuts it all: sandalwood and cloves, soft salt and sweet smoke.

He’s still transfixed when she sighs and steps completely out of all of her clothes, when she closes the distance between them.

He watches her reach for his hands.

The skin of her shoulders is startling: taut over muscle, crisscrossed with thin raised lines of scar tissue. She radiates warmth into his fingertips.

“Unless you don’t want this,” she growls, “I don’t know what you’re imitating a statue for.”

Erik finally finds his voice: “Oh, I want this,” he mutters, and he lets one hand slide down, fingertips tracing the swell of her breast, a slow circle around the edges of the areola, watching her shiver despite the stoic set of her features. “Why are you offering? _What_ are you offering?”

“Well, perhaps there’s still some sense in that head of yours, if you’re lucid enough to ask for terms. That pleases me, and you deserve a reward.”

With his hands on her he can feel her move as she lifts easily onto the balls of her feet. Her fingertips pull him down, steady inexorable gravity.

He’s still looking at her face; that indecipherable smile fades, and then - plush soft warmth opening, damp against his mouth.

Charlotte breathes into him, and he wants to fall to his knees, he wants to lift her, he wants to throw her down. She is electrifying enough to stop all of his thoughts in their tracks.

He kisses her back, helpless, desperate - he remembers the flash of a knife, the sulfur of a lighter. He remembers wild light in wild eyes, flash of lucidity, there and suddenly gone - lost in bleak silent madness.

He can’t breathe. He can’t break away. She’s a weight, holding him down where she wants him: she has him trapped, one hand at the back of his head, the other clutching at his shoulder.

Charlotte licks into his mouth, again and again, and Erik has no choice but to open up to her, to let her drink him down.

He doesn’t have any choice in the matter, either, when she guides his hands to his own buttons and nips at his mouth - he only has enough strength to recognize the warning, to heed her unspoken command, and he fumbles his shirt off as best as he can.

When he has to pull his undershirt off he catches a glimpse of Charlotte. Kiss-swollen lips. Dark flame in eyes that are so dark they can no longer be called blue. Sweat pooling in the hollow between her collar bones. Her hair is a mess of unruly curls falling every which way.

She growls at him, tries to shake his shoulders, but to no avail: he’s too busy looking, too busy being pinned down to struggle or break away or move toward her.

Bad as the light is, there’s enough for him to perceive the curve of her hip, the gentle swell of her belly, the soft darkness at her core, the heave and thrust of her breathing. Freckles and scars, old and new hurts. Rough cords of vein and muscle, shifting beneath her skin.

“You like what you see,” Charlotte says, sounding completely normal despite the catch in her breath. She is just as matter-of-fact when she unbuckles his belt, when she undoes his trousers and pulls down his undershorts.

Erik lets her, and afterwards steps carefully out of his clothes. There is nothing he can do against the heat of her skin against his. There is nothing he can say against the the darkness of her eyes.

He goes where he puts her: he falls to his knees when she pulls down on his wrists, and he goes with fear and relief sinking their claws into his skin, into his mind, threatening to rend him and hold him together.

He looks up, and Charlotte looms over him. The attic is dark and he can no longer see her face. But he can still feel her eyes on him, and he can still hear her and smell her. Sweat, salt, sharp musk.

“What are you waiting for,” Charlotte whispers.

He has no idea what to say, and there is only one thing he can say. “Please tell me what you want.”

He feels her go still above him. “Say that again.”

Erik closes his eyes, and speaks in a whisper because the words are weighted. Because the words are the terrible truth brought to life. “I want you to tell me what you want. What you need.”

“Do you think you could actually understand what you’re doing?”

“You could make me understand.”

Charlotte laughs, then - deep and piercing and full of dark promises. “Oh, believe me, I have _ways_ of making people understand. The only question is, are you ready for that?”

More laughter - and then Charlotte’s hand comes down hard around the nape of Erik’s neck, pulling him forward.

His nose touches the tangle of her hair, soft and springy and smoky.

He wants her, he wants her now. He’s wanted her since he first laid his eyes on her.

As if she’s reading his mind, she says, suddenly, “Not until I give you the word.”

The words are rough, as though they’d been caught and bitten back and then reluctantly given voice, and they leave him tense and shivering, straining against the restraint that she’s imposing on him.

There isn’t much innocence left in Erik; he’s had people and he’s been had by them. He knows how to use a fist and a whip and a knife for pleasure. He has memories of being tied down, left to struggle free, given orders to stay silent, and wanting more.

This is different, however: this is him wanting so badly to obey, blind foolishness - the same instinct that is also goading him to just dive straight in and drive Charlotte down.

“Kiss me,” Charlotte says, as quiet as a long-forgotten melody.

Erik nods, once, and the kiss is chaste for all that it’s placed directly over her mons pubis, soft and yielding. Applying just the tiniest amount of pressure to the skin is the difficult thing, because he wants more - so much more - every breath fills him up with the heat of her.

“I want to meet whoever taught you to obey. Alix?”

Erik shakes his head.

“I’ll know if you’re lying. You haven’t tried to sleep with her? Tell me.”

He’s pulled away, and he doesn’t resist, no matter how much he wants to stay where he’d been. “She was just telling me that she was glad that I had never made a pass at her.”

“Why not? Alix is beautiful. Dangerous. You would suit each other.”

“Alix isn’t my type.”

Charlotte chuckles. “You really are telling me the truth.”

When he’s pushed back he takes a breath of her, and then there is a long, long pause before: “You want a taste, don’t you.”

He shakes his head.

“No? You want all of it? Greedy,” she says, but she sounds approving all the same, and Erik takes that in: the ripple of her voice, the weight of her hand on his body. “Luckily for you, greedy is the right thing to be. So now’s your chance. Have your fill.”

“Thank you,” Erik whispers against Charlotte - then he sinks down and tilts his head and opens his mouth.

She is slick and wet and he can’t get enough of the smell of her, he can’t get enough of the taste of her - he thrusts up into her with his tongue, again and again, and he doesn’t hear her gasping for breath but he can feel her trembling around him, wet and sweet and trickling over his teeth and his lips, down his chin.

“ _Stop,_ ” she says, suddenly, and Erik freezes in place, reluctant to move, needing to obey.

“You’re going to make me fall,” Charlotte mutters, and that’s when she sits down, that’s when she opens her legs to him.

Erik can’t stop looking at her, at the pulse of her, at the sticky sheen on the skin of her inner thighs.

“Come here,” Charlotte says, and Erik waits for her to put her hand on the back of his head. Waits for her to push him down, sudden swift movement, enough that the blood rushes in his veins.

She’s soaking now as he works her over with her mouth. Sucking pressure over her clitoris, making her buck and whisper obscenities, sweet rasp across his nerves. He licks into her over and over again, fast and slow, deep and shallow.

Suddenly she’s pulling desperately at him, clawing at his shoulders, heels drumming into his back - he redoubles his pace, his world reduced to Charlotte’s hammering pulse and to heat and to the taste of her, every nerve ending lit up, working and waiting breathlessly for her to fall over the edge.

Charlotte gasps, once, loudly, and does.

Erik grins, and keeps going even as she rocks desperately beneath him - he gradually slows his pace, gradually eases her down.

He sits back and waits for her to catch her breath, and takes in the sight of her: spread out and shaking and briefly unfocused.

After a while he becomes aware, again, of his own body - of his own nerves at the breaking point, of his neglected erection. He looks down at himself, engorged and leaking.

“Were you planning to do anything with that?” Charlotte inquires, and he’s more than familiar with the rough edge of sarcasm in her words.

“If you let me,” Erik says.

“And if I don’t?”

He takes a deep breath and looks her in the eyes. “Then I won’t do anything.”

“You are unexpected,” Charlotte says after a brief silence.

“As are you.”

“You’re really going to do as I tell you.”

“I know how to obey.”

Charlotte smirks. “You didn’t, when I told you to get lost or else you’d die.”

“You didn’t follow through yourself.”

She makes a face; in the half-light he can just see that she’s frowning - eyebrows pulled together into a straight line over her eyes, magnificently lost in the shadows. “I still could.”

Erik nods in complete agreement. “Yes.”

“You’re frightened.”

“Not of death,” Erik says. “Not even of any death you could devise for me.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

“I am afraid of you, Charlotte,” Erik says, slowly. “Only of you.”

Charlotte stares at him, and he fights off the urge to look away: he forces himself to meet her eyes.

Eventually, she says, “I don’t know what to make of you, and I have _not_ had to say those words in years.”

“Is it a compliment?” Erik asks.

“I don’t think it is, because I can’t decide whether you’re lucid or you’re actually more gone than I already am.”

Erik grins, then, in spite of himself, in spite of being thwarted, in spite of being left high and dry. “All right. Either way, thank you.”

There’s a rustle, and then the familiar hiss of a match being struck, and Erik looks right at Charlotte as the flame catches on the shadows burning in her eyes.

“Do you know what you’re getting into?” she asks.

“No,” he says.

“I’ll tell you. Eventually.”

“All right,” Erik says again, before he lies down and makes sure to be facing away from her.

To no avail, because there’s a soft _tsking_ sound and then there’s warmth searing up his spine, soft skin and scars pressed against him, and the twin rapid-fire pulses of Charlotte’s heart and of her breathing.

He leans back into her and allows himself to sleep.

*

Erik feels the steps moving towards him and before he’s completely awake he’s sitting up; before he can open his eyes he’s already groping for a weapon.

He risks a quick glance over his shoulder at Charlotte: she’s still asleep, or still looks like she’s sleeping - curled up in nothing but her skin, one hand still clenched around a matchbook.

“Are you decent?” asks a familiar voice, too near, and Erik blinks at last - only to find himself stark naked and looking at Alix, who is lounging on the stairs to the attic.

“What is the point of asking a question like that when you’re already here?” he growls at her.

“Because your reactions are always good for a laugh.” Alix grins.

He rolls his eyes as hard as he can. “Suit yourself. Are you up here because you’ve killed Sanza?”

“I don’t exactly think he’s quite _dead_ yet,” is the flippant reply. “Maybe he’s sleeping, maybe he’s lost a little too much blood. Either way, he’s quiet for now.”

“Have you at least gotten started on the list?”

“Must you be so noisy,” Charlotte interjects.

Erik looks at her again, and almost snorts out a laugh, because somehow she’s managed to reach for something to cover herself up with.

That the item in question happens to be Erik’s discarded shirt doesn’t escape Alix - she throws him a smile that she probably thinks is both conspiratorial and congratulatory, and it makes him roll his eyes again.

“Alix is about to tell us about Sanza,” he says in Charlotte’s direction.

“So I gathered. Is he dead?”

“He might be, but I got him to sing,” Alix says. “Told him to keep it down so I wouldn’t wake you up. But sing he did. It’s an interesting list if I might say so myself. A bare handful of names. And I’d wager money that I don’t have that Jean knows _every single one of them_.”

Charlotte smirks. “What is it going to take for you to give me that precious list and then get out of my way? Both of you?”

“Oh, that’s painful, that really is. I would never have guessed you for the type to cut and run.”

“But that’s what I do, Alix,” Charlotte says, honey-sweet.

Alix laughs and seems completely unperturbed. “Yes, I suppose so. Well. Let’s do this like ordinary people, shall we - ”

“Normal people are boring,” Erik says.

At the same time, Charlotte growls out the word “ _People_ ” as though it’s a particularly vile obscenity.

“So it’s a double act? You should take that on the road. Hilarious, both of you,” Alix says.

“It’s a skill,” Erik says. “I’ll be down in a moment.”

“Do hurry, there’s not much life left in him.”

Which is only the truth, as Erik finds out: there’s a pool of blood surrounding the chair, and Sanza has turned a distinct shade of gray. The wounds all up and down his arms and legs are still bleeding, albeit sluggishly. His eyelids are weighted and heavy, and he’s breathing like he’s been running through the night and then some.

Alix is standing nearby, leaning into a beam of weak sunlight to examine her nails nonchalantly.

“You’d better have been telling my associate the truth,” Erik says conversationally in Sanza’s direction. “You don’t want me finishing the job she started, because she is a paragon of mercy, compared to me.”

 _That_ gets their victim’s attention: Sanza wakes completely, and there is still enough life in him to make him look frightened. “I’ve told her everything.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“I don’t know much! I told her what I knew!”

Erik smirks. “And all I want to know is whether ‘everything’ also includes ‘the truth’. Are you not familiar with the distinction? Because I’d be happy to teach you.”

The chair rattles quietly when Sanza starts shaking. “No more, please, I don’t know what else you can do - ”

“I hope you’re not asking for a demonstration,” Erik says.

“No! No! Ask me your questions!”

Erik looks at Alix, who shrugs at him; then he looks at Charlotte, who merely rolls her eyes and waves a careless hand in his direction.

“All right,” Erik says. “If that’s how you want to play - let’s play.”

*

It’s Alix’s idea to bury Sanza in the dark topsoil beneath the floorboards of the house.

It’s Charlotte’s to burn the house to the ground on top of him.

When the flames begin to lick at the roof, when the walls begin to come down, Erik turns to the others and asks, “Any last words?”

“Give me the list,” Charlotte says again. Her eyes are intent on the fire.

“You could come with us,” Alix offers.

“No. List.”

“And then what,” Erik asks.

Charlotte very nearly smiles when she slants a look at him. “And then maybe we’ll see how quickly you and your precious Jean can move. The people on that list deserve death - maybe you’ll grant them that, _after_ I’m done with them.”

He knows he’s standing on the edge of an abyss, and he knows that the abyss has blue eyes, looking back at him.

Loyalty. Lack of sense. _Mazik._ Alix watching his back. Charlotte groaning above him.

“Alix,” he says.

“Is this goodbye, Erik?” Alix asks.

Charlotte laughs softly, contemptuously.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Erik says.

“You’ve come back before,” Alix says.

“Because I needed help.”

“True.” Alix sighs. “We all have our own arrangements. At least come back and make a clean break of it.”

Erik turns to Charlotte, then. “I know there’s no point in asking you to wait for me.”

More laughter. “That would be a fair guess.”

“Then I’ll see you when I see you.”

“I’ll think about it.”

**Four: Claimed**

Erik does several things in the week after withdrawing from Jean’s group.

He buys half a dozen dress shirts - pleated cotton, double cuffs, turndown collars - and sends them to Alix, together with one of his stiletto knives. The letter he encloses in the package is tersely affectionate: _Not that you need more armor or another weapon, but I still hope that you might find these useful._

He procures a pair of handcuffs and teaches himself how to put them on and how to get them off. No one looks twice at him when he buys a package of bobby pins; he spends several nights getting used to using them as makeshift lockpicks, not just on the handcuffs but also on the locks on his doors.

He learns how to make a Bijou, although he has to content himself with using ordinary drinking glasses and passable, just barely, ingredients.

He spends a lot of time alternating between sleeping heavily - ten to twelve hours at a stretch - and watching his doors and his windows.

The habits of a lifetime are hard to break and he finds himself wandering from city to city once again, always looking over his shoulder. The forced indolence is something he can tolerate; the idea of leisure is not unappealing.

But it’s the sensation of eyes watching him everywhere that keeps him going: torn between looking out for enemies and looking out for the one who promised to kill him.

There are blue eyes in every street; there are dark curls around every corner.

His steps eventually take him to Florence, for only the second time in his life, and for a while he forgets his hidden search as he takes in the city and its sights: the tourist spots by day and the shores of the Arno by night.

He’s in a tiny, unnamed cafe just on the outskirts of the Piazza della Repubblica when he catches the woman behind the bar as she nods and reaches for a familiar trio of bottles: gin and vermouth and Chartreuse.

A woman says, “ _Sì, mille grazie._ ”

Erik takes a breath, and another, and another, and feels like he’s drowning.

Footsteps approaching his table. He can no longer hear the voices from the rest of the cafe; he can no longer see the cup and saucer between his hands.

He isn’t trembling, just, but he feels like he’s been pulled taut, every nerve alight and singing.

Charlotte is smiling at him from beneath her trilby: maroon with a black hatband, into which is pinned a single long feather, dark gray barred in bronze. The hat is the only bit of color in her severely tailored outfit; she is wearing black otherwise, from the middy collar that frames her throat to her full skirts and ballet flats.

He watches her tilt her head at the unoccupied chair, and doesn’t know where he finds the strength to say, “Please.”

“Have you been waiting long?” Charlotte asks.

Erik nods.

“I had some other business to take care of.” Her voice is light and teasing, but her eyes are dark and full of strange promises that Erik cannot put into words.

“It’s all right.”

Charlotte smiles, and sips her Bijou. “Do you have any plans for tonight?”

“I can cancel them.”

“Can you? Won’t there be people waiting for you? People to pluck at your sleeves and pull you away?”

“There aren’t any,” Erik says, and the words come out wrapped in a growl. “There’s just me. No one else.”

He watches Charlotte’s smile curl into a smirk. “I’ll be the judge of that.”

They cross a handful of bridges on the way back to his rooms, and Erik carries himself stiffly, acutely aware of the woman whose arm is tucked into his: he can’t help but see every expression that crosses her face, every breath she takes, every step and every movement. The soft wind ruffles the curls at the back of her neck and tosses capriciously at her skirts.

It’s a much, much longer walk than usual, for all that they don’t stop - not even at the bakery on the corner, which makes wonderful pane sciocco.

He gestures Charlotte through the door, and watches her stride briskly past the tiny table with its mismatched chairs, past the sagging wardrobe, past the windows with their two sets of curtains - straight into the bedroom, where she looks skeptically at the low-slung bed. The mattress still contains the impression of Erik’s body; the sheets are still stained with his sweat.

“This will do for now,” she murmurs. “Just for tonight. Do you have any objections to moving?”

Erik looks up from his hands, which are shaking around his glass of water. “If you want me to move, I’ll move.”

“My bed is better. Bigger. Not that you’ll be needing it all the time.”

“Yes,” Erik says.

“Come here,” Charlotte says.

When he enters his bedroom she is standing at the head of the bed, so he stops at the foot of it. He has to fight the instinct to lower his gaze.

He watches Charlotte cross her arms over her chest. “You’re alone, now.”

Erik nods. “I already told you that. I’m alone. I have no connections to anyone.”

“I’ll always know if you’re lying to me.”

“I don’t have any reason to.”

She frowns, serious and severe. “You will tell me the truth, no matter where you are, no matter what I’m doing.”

“There was only one night on which I lied to you, and it had to do with the task that I was working on. You’ve had all of the truth from me since then.”

She considers him for a very long moment.

The sun is gone by the time she speaks again: “Get down on your knees and put your hands behind your back.”

Erik doesn’t obey, not immediately: he goes to the table next to the door, first, and retrieves his pair of handcuffs; he drops them onto the mattress between the two of them.

Charlotte has an eyebrow raised and her smirk back firmly in place. “You have been busy.”

He nods. The floor is hard on his knees, but he feels strangely comfortable.

He watches intently as Charlotte picks the handcuffs up and turns them over in her hands. “You want to wear these?”

“If you put them on me.”

“I’ll bet that you put them on yourself and didn’t enjoy it at all.”

“I did. And yes.”

“It has to be a woman’s touch?”

Erik shakes his head. “It has to be yours.”

Charlotte looks pleased. “Let’s see. Eyes forward, Erik.”

Two syllables, and a word that he knows all too well.

It’s the first time she’s said his name out loud, and it leaves him breathless. It’s like she’s yanked all the wind out of his sails - it leaves him pliant, willing to be pliant, blindly obedient.

She is a tangible presence when she steps behind him, out of sight, but weighing down on every inch of his skin.

The handcuffs are warm from her hands when they go onto his wrists, tight and unyielding.

“Hold still,” she says, and then he can see her arms around him, moving to his belt and undoing the buckle with deft movements. “What do you want?”

“Whatever you want,” Erik whispers.

“Good, that’s a good answer,” Charlotte says - and then he feels his shirt tighten across his shoulders, feels her yank out his shirttails and wrap them around her fists.

The sound of his shirt tearing is loud in the room, and it makes him gasp: there is such strength in her hands, and she uses it so well and so casually. It leaves him hard, and straining against his trousers, so quickly that he’s left slightly light-headed - he’s left shaking in anticipation, muscles tense for fight-or-flight, except that he has no intentions of doing the one and he’s not allowed to do the other.

Charlotte’s hand, heavy and hot on the nape of his neck, forcing him down, until his forehead is resting on the mattress. His back is bared to her, every dip and bump of his spine, every inch of scarred flesh stretched over his many-times-broken bones. He can’t do anything with his hands.

He can hear the leather of his belt creaking. Instinct makes him flinch, but he reins himself in.

That makes her laugh. “I’ll be very pleased with you if you don’t make a sound. If you do - well, you’ll find out.”

There’s a soft quick whistling and then he’s in sudden bright pain, sharp shock of it, and he bites his scream back with effort.

Another strike. Another. He’s burning up with the ferocity of her. The pain thrums through every inch of him. It’s as if she’s singing him a powerful and drugging song, pulling him down, tearing him to pieces.

She beats him systematically, moving slowly down from his shoulders to the small of his back, and then up again.

She beats him mercilessly, groaning and hissing with each strike, and her voice seems to amplify each terrible impact.

After ten strokes he catches the unmistakable scent of iron in the close air. His blood mingling with her sweat, his tears falling unnoticed into the sheets.

After fifteen, he can’t hold his words back any more: “So close, too much, please, _Charlotte_ \- ”

Sweetly hitching laughter. “So you’re enjoying yourself?”

“Yes, yes, yes - ”

“All right. That’s fine. But now it’s my turn,” she says.

Erik trembles when Charlotte presses a kiss into the tender skin stretched between his shoulders: stinging silverhot pleasure.

“Come for me,” she says.

“I - ” he starts.

She bites him, then, swift and sweet overload, and he gasps, blinded by beautiful pain, blinded by the climax that spears through him.

*

He wakes up with a start: he’s on his stomach, he’s on the bed. Head on his own pillow. The handcuffs are gone, leaving only the memory of their metal imprinted on Erik’s wrists.

The memory of Charlotte’s teeth in his skin is just as vivid, and briefly he wishes for a mirror, so he could look at the marks she left on him.

Outside the curtains there is a distant possibility of light, but he can’t tell if it’s dusk or dawn or lamps.

When he shifts, confused, pain flares up in every inch of him and just as suddenly subsides into a heavy throb that he can’t get enough of - it makes him shiver even as he makes himself move to feel it lapping at him, like blades, sweetly addictive.

The bed, too, is moving: Erik turns his head and very nearly starts upright.

Completely silent, completely abandoned, her face twisted into lines of pure ecstasy: Charlotte is on her back beside him, stripped to her skin, flushed and sweating, chest heaving. Feet braced on the bed, knees splayed wide.

He looks over his shoulder, looks at her hands between her legs: there is just enough light for him to see her slick fingers as they move in and out. Changing rhythms: now she’s thrusting rapidly, now she’s languid. With the thumb of her free hand she rubs rapid little circles over her mons, over the place where Erik had kissed her and lapped at her.

“Stay where you are,” she says, “just watch me.”

He doesn’t actually know if there is anything else he can look at, transfixed as he is by the sight of her: he’s seen her body before, and he’s pleased that he remembers where many of her scars are.

Suddenly Charlotte goes still, and Erik aches to be with her as she rides out her release.

The smell of sex is just as heavy as that of blood.

Eyes still closed, Charlotte manages to say, “Turn over.”

His nerves protest the renewed pain, but he basks in the rasp of it - and then he forgets everything else when Charlotte moves, when she swings one leg over him.

She’s up on her knees and she’s looming over him. Her eyes full of smoky lust. “I know you want to fuck me.”

He keeps himself flat on the sheets. She hasn’t given him any new orders since telling him to stay put, so he’ll _stay put_. He’ll keep watching. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

It makes Charlotte throw her head back and laugh. “How is it that you _haven’t_ done this before?”

Erik smiles, satisfied.

That smile is short-lived - it falls away when she looks at him again, dark glittering eyes. “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

He does. He closes his eyes, and says it out loud. “I gave everything else up so that I could follow you. So you could do whatever you wanted to me.”

“You’ll look for no other. You’ll be with no other. You’ll only be mine.”

“I’ll be yours, and only yours,” Erik echoes. “I don’t need any others.”

“When we’re in private you will live by my rules, and you will follow my orders.”

“And in public?”

Charlotte smirks. “Use what judgement you have. For whatever it’s worth.”

He thinks that over. It’s hard to think of the risks and the possibilities when he’s still so badly distracted by the smell of Charlotte, by the light playing off her skin, by the very nearness of her - but in the end that is also an easy decision to make, as easy as deciding to be here in the first place, held beneath her, caught up in her. “All right.”

“I’m sure we’ll find a way to argue it all out.”

That makes him roll his eyes. “I’m sure you’ll find a way to enjoy that kind of thing.”

Mercurial malice in her smile. “Yes. Now forget about that. I’ve other business with you.”

When her voice drops at the end of that sentence Erik’s breath catches in his throat.

“Don’t move,” she says, and the shadows of the room shift on her scars and freckles as she bends over gracefully and takes him into her mouth.

He grits out her name, once. “Charlotte.”

The pop of her pulling away is soft and startling and thoroughly obscene. “Maybe I’ll let you make some noise this time. I want to hear you when I’m breaking you.”

“I - please,” he says, and just manages to hold himself down through sheer willpower. He wants her kiss, her touch, he wants her to burn him, and he tries to put all of it into those two words.

She laughs, softly, and bends back to her task: now her tongue strokes slowly over the head, now her teeth scrape gently over the vein on the underside. She hums around him. She licks into his slit.

He begs for her, begs for more, shameless.

When he’s on the edge again, trembling over the long fall down, she _stops_ , and Erik keens for her. “Please, please - ”

Charlotte shushes him, holds him down at his hips when she pulls off for the second time.

Erik watches, wide-eyed, as she holds him in place with one hand and opens up her cunt with the other - he can see her, wet and red - hot and powerful clench around him as she sinks down, down, down.

“Tell me what you’re supposed to do,” Charlotte hisses.

“Stay still,” Erik says, the words broken around a deep groan.

“You do that,” she says, and then she falls forward, braces herself with her hands on his chest.

She rides him hard, and he cries out with each rocking thrust, her name and a series of incoherent syllables falling from his lips. His eyes are fixed on hers, wide dark fathomless.

But it’s the smile on her face that finishes him off at last: brightly triumphant, feckless and mad.

He shouts her name and in the echoes of it he hears her gasp, catches a glimpse of her going impossibly still, once again.

Erik is certain of only one thing, as his orgasm strips away his thoughts, blistering them away, one after another: Charlotte must have him, now and always.

He has no idea of what he’ll wake up to, when he drags himself back from the break - she might leave him alive, or she might leave him dead, or she might leave him and never come back; she might capture him or torture him or collar him.

He might as well embrace her madness. He might as well plunge headlong, heedlessly.

**the end**  



End file.
